Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy. (Politics General)

@Meanlucario
The fact that you purposefully left out Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan and other successful OECD countries shows a selective bias.

@IWTCIEM
OECD? And I was giving examples of governments that are actually dystopian. And Japen is very fucked, between their workplace condition and conditioning and how they treat sexual harassment.

@IWTCIEM
what the fuck even is OECD?

@Vortaxonus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OECD

@Vortaxonus
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Most of its members are part of the “rich democratic countries club”.

@Ereiam
Thank you.

@Background Pony #1F81
I’m surprised it was the Gadsden flag that was controversial and not the giant “[someone] for vice president” flag on his backpack.

@Vivace
Does “grooming” have some meaning that I’m not aware of? I don’t see how interviewing a cringe kid is “grooming”?

@BlitztheDragon
Oh no, sounds like fuel for conspiracies.

@Background Pony #1D40
Grooming can mean conditioning young people for an immoral goal.

So I had a rather strange interaction on Fur Affinity today.

Person noted me after I faved some pics of their OCs asking if I’d like to RP. Upon further review of the user’s page, I saw they have a link to a Truth.social account, and I saw in their gallery they have commissioned - as in paid money for - TWO separate commissions centered around how much they hate the perceived wokeness of Amazon Prime’s Lord of the Rings series. I figured that things were going to get interesting once this person noticed the overtly leftist items in my gallery.

There was a bit of back and forth that’s irrelevant. But minutes after their most recent attempt to negotiate a roleplay, they followed up with “I changed my mind. I’m not interested in people who love and praise Hitler. Don’t contact me again.” Then they blocked me.

Like, how divorced from reality do you need to be to see someone post some leftwing and pro-trans rights stuff and conclude “This guy must love and praise Hitler!”

@BlitztheDragon
By chance did you have any pro Ukraine images in your gallery?

I did not.

@BlitztheDragon
Weird. Hitler is much more associated with the right due to how Republicans are friend friendly to white-supremacist. Maybe they were taught it was the left who are cozy with Nazis because their “friends” don’t want them to leave for saner pastures.

@BlitztheDragon
Just checking because Vatniks view Zelensky as Hitler which means in their eyes anyone who supports Ukraine supports Nazis (when Putin is the wannabe Hitler).

And now for the Andrew Torba variety hour. Yeah the tag “BantheADL” has been spreading on Twitter:

Why Elon Can’t #BantheADL, Even If He Wanted To

Over the past few days a grassroots campaign popped up on X calling for the platform to ban the ADL. The campaign, united around the hashtag #BantheADL, has been trending on the platform for days with hundreds of thousands of posts.

This campaign comes after the CEO of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, made a post gloating about his organization’s sheer power to control the platform that Elon Musk purchased for tens of billions of dollars last year. Although the #BantheADL campaign effectively highlighted the significant influence the ADL holds in regulating the flow of information online, it is essential to delve into the reasons why Elon Musk cannot remove the ADL from the platform or hinder their effective management of his company, even if he were inclined to do so.

First we have to understand a bit of the context for how a platform like X actually works and is able to exist on the internet along with the inside baseball of how the ADL flexes its power to control massive corporations without owning a single share.

X is built on the rails of multiple third-party services including, but not limited to the Google Cloud infrastructure among others. X has had a partnership with Google Cloud since 2018, and Bloomberg reports that this collaboration has incurred annual expenses ranging from $200 million to $300 million for the company. Jonathan Greenblatt has openly bragged about the ADL’s partnership with Google, YouTube, Facebook, and X, going so far as to change the algorithms of these companies to meet their demands.

With one phone call to Google the ADL can cripple X. If Google pulls the plug on the cloud hosting deal massive parts of X’s critical infrastructure will be down for a long time, possibly the entire platform would be taken offline with one click. We saw this happen in 2020 with Parler when Amazon AWS pulled the plug and the platform was taken offline. They were never able to fully recover and recently shut the platform down completely after it sold to a third-party.

Going after the cloud hosting providers is just the start for the ADL’s ability to utterly destroy X. Next come the app store bans. With that same phone call to Google the ADL could easily highlight the hundreds of thousands of “antisemitic” posts on the platform and point the the #BantheADL posts as their prime example. Don’t put it past them. They likely have multiple studies going on behind the scenes tracking the “rise in hate” on the platform since Elon took over and will use this to present their case.

Without critical infrastructure and the app stores X would be in serious trouble, but Elon may be able to pull off a miracle and keep the platform online. Next come the advertisers. The ADL has close connections with all of the top Fortune 500 companies and will use their mafia-style power to get these companies to pull their ad dollars from X. This has already been going on since the moment Elon took over the platform. X is operating in a cash flow negative situation and reports claim that ad revenue has fallen by a dramatic 50% since Elon took over.

That’s only the beginning. Next the ADL will contact the sitting members of Congress and the Biden White House. We’ll see Elon be summoned to testify in Congress about the rise in “misinformation” and “hate” on the platform since he took over.

Elon is in a unique position because he’s not only running X. He’s also running several other companies including SpaceX and Tesla, both of which require him to appease the Regime and stay within their favor. The ADL can and will go after not only X, but all of Elon’s companies. It’s no coincidence that the CEO of X is having meetings with the ADL just days after the DOJ announced that they were suing SpaceX.

How do I know all of this? Because I lived it–and survived it by the grace of God.

The ADL has been attacking Gab and me for many years. Their smear campaigns against us successfully lobbied dozens of third-party services to deplatform us and cripple our infrastructure. Despite all of their efforts this didn’t stop us. We were able to rebuild our own servers, payment processing, and so much more in order to keep Gab online. It took many years and it wasn’t easy, but we are still standing.

The ADL has also come after me personally. They pay Google to promote their smear articles about me to the top of search results. They lobbied the DOJ to investigate me after January 6th, even though I wasn’t even in attendance. Jonathan Greenblatt went on national television and called me “one of the most toxic people in public life” effectively painting a target on my back.

None of this stopped me.

I don’t fear the ADL. I don’t answer to the ADL. I fear and answer only to God almighty.

The ADL has NO POWER over Gab which is why they hate us. It’s that simple. There is absolutely nothing they can say or do to get us to censor opinions they don’t like and it’s going to stay that way.

Elon has a choice. He can continue to allow this disgusting organization to run his company by proxy without his approval or he can fight back, take a stand like Gab has, and face the consequences head on. He can continue to have his CEO take groveling phone calls and enforce the ADL’s strategy of freedom of speech but not freedom of reach or he can tell them to pound sand. If he can’t run his own business without permission from some ghoulish vampire at the ADL there’s no sense in running a business at all.

For me it was an easy decision.

Andrew Torba

So yeah Twitter still isn’t an “anything goes” platform, and likely never will be because Elon would have too much to lose.

Can’t say I’m the biggest fan in the world of the ADL myself, but that above letter just reeks of Global Jewish Conspiracy talking points.

@lonewolf
@BlitztheDragon
ADL?

@Meanlucario
Anti-Defamation League, an Jewish organization founded before World War One that fights against anti-semitism (and, unsurprisingly, leans heavily zionist).

70,000 people are stranded at Burning Man due to record rainfall. There has already been a fatality, and a majority of the attendees are trapped for the time being.

I think it is rather ironic that an event that was initially interrupted by climate protests…ended up falling victim to a record breaking climate incident.

@Zincy
Are we going to start attributing any unusual weather to climate change now?

@Zincy
The important thing is Chris Rock got out safely.

@kleptomage
There’s no denying that extreme climatic events are getting more frequent because of climate change.

I was half joking.

But yes in this case the record rainfall was trigger by excessive heating in the south pacific. Mostly triggered by ongoing tempture changes to the southernly flowing currents. They’ve been getting progressively hotter for the last few decades, and we are starting to see increasing severity in the resulting storms.

The storm dumped 3 months worth of rain within hours.

This is following Hurrican Hillary, which absolutely shattered records as well. Fueled by the warming of the currents.

Just because you’re both A. Ignorant of the science. And B. Personally invested in hobbies that contribute to the problem does not mean it’s not happening.

I’m sorry that this is inconvenient, or if you think there is some dark agenda here. But you have to face the fact that every shred of data we have points to the climate changing due to human activity.

@Zincy
You both assume I am an ignorant climate change denier because I express skepticism that one storm is the direct result of climate change. That is unfortunately the kind of response I have to expect.

Of course climate change caused by humans is real. The climate is a complex system and dumping millions of tons of CO2 into the system is going to have an effect.

My concern is politicians using climate change as a bludgeon against people, to control them and limit their rights and freedoms. I know that you don’t care. You’ll think I’m just being paranoid and if some freedoms have to be curtailed, well, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, right?

@Ereiam
Zionist? Dare I ask what that means?

@kleptomage
I mean, without dismissing your concerns, the current negative effects from climate change are a little more concerning right now that its hypothetical use as an excuse for government despotism.

@Meanlucario
Pro-Israel

@kleptomage
That’s what I hate about the whole global warming thing. There is no in-between. You either accept it and must do everything you can to stop it (i.e.: carpool, take the bus, buy a Tesla, force people to buy Teslas in 2035, etc.,) or you deny it because it’s cheaper to do (at least for now.)